The latest update to Luminar has just been released and it contains the new “Sky Enhancer” filter which Skylum have been plugging for a little while. The feature is another of the companies AI tools and it is specifically designed to enhance skies.

I realise that I’ve been covering Capture One quite a bit lately, but that’s mainly because of the announcements around Photokina regarding its partnership with Fujifilm. However, there’s lots of other software related news and releases, and I haven’t quite kept up with it all. Skylum, in addition to launching Aurora HDR2019, has also been making some announcements regarding Luminar, all of which are pretty interesting.

I’ve been trying to catalogue a drive full of Raw files going back several years (more on that in a future post), and during the process, I got sidetracked and started playing with some of the older images. I came across one shot that I had taken in Washington DC a few years ago, which I really liked at the time, but now I realise that I had over-edited it originally. I wanted to have another go at it, and so I thought It would be interesting to try it in Luminar, and it would make a good tutorial.

Skylum software is having a flash sale on Luminar for the next four days from today, Thursday, July 19, through to Sunday, July 22. I normally don’t post these offers, as everyone who is on the affiliate programme will be shortly, and my RSS reader gets full of the same post, but it’s a pretty good deal, so I’m going to make the exception this time.

When Skylum released the latest version of Luminar last month it had some significant improvements to the RAW processing engine. This included some much-needed features such as a significant speed increase and automatic lens corrections. I wanted to see how well it could now be used as a RAW processor for Fuji files, and so I put it through its paces and came up with some basic workflows. 

Skylum today announced the release of a significant new version of Luminar. The update 1.2.0 for Luminar 2018 includes lots of new features (they claim over 300 improvements) but there are a couple of fairly significant ones that I’m going to cover. The most notable of which is a dramatic improvement in the speed of opening and working with raw files. They’ve also added automatic lens correction (finally) and support for DCP colour profiles (not to be confused with Lut mapping).

I’m starting a new series of Luminar QuickTips on my YouTube channel and I’ve just posted the first of these. In the video, I look at using the Sunrays filter to enhance an image that already has a sun in the shot. 

One of the issues that I have when using RAW files in Luminar is that the colours are often a little flat and the contrast is a bit washed out. This comes from RAW files not having a proper profile in the software, and while it has improved in recent years, it’s still a ways off from the default results that you would get in the likes of Lightroom or Photoshop.

I was playing around with some photos in Photoshop earlier today, and I was also using Luminar as a plug-in, when I stumbled across something cool, almost by accident. It’s one of those things, that seems kind of obvious on hindsight, but I had never thought of trying this before. You can use Luminar non-destructively within Photoshop if you use it on a smart layer. 

I’ve covered working with Fuji RAW files in Luminar before here on the blog, but I haven’t talked too much about using it with RAW files from other cameras. I had been going through some old images for another project, and I came across some images that I had taken with the Sony A7II which I had borrowed from a friend at the time. So, I tried some of the images in Luminar, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Skylum software has just announced the first Luminar 2018 update for..well, 2018! The update focuses mainly on bug fixes and adds support for more languages on the Windows version. There are no new features apart from some additional camera support, so sorry, no sign of the DAM side of thing yet :-(

I’m happy to introduce my first new digital product of 2018, and something that I’ve been working on for quite some time. Today I’m launching a new set of LUTs based on my “Film Candy” series of Lightroom presets. This set of 75 LUTs contains looks from both Film candy 1 and 2 and have been designed to be used in popular video applications as well as stills software such as Luminar 2018 and Photoshop.

I wanted to match the look of an old photo that I already had, with a new image that I had just shot, but it was only a Jpeg. Starting in Apple Photos, and using Luminar as an extension I walk you through the editing process to make this otherwise dull image more dramatic.

One of the things that struck me about the new artificial intelligence based automatic function in Lightroom was that it sounded a lot like Luminar’s accent AI filter. I was curious to see how they would compare, so I made a quick video see. 

As many of my readers shoot with Fuji cameras, and many of you have expressed an interest in using Luminar 2018 for processing Fuji files, I wanted to give an overview of what I think is the best way to work with Fuji files currently. This is just an overview, and doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail. I am planning do a proper guide for this, but for now, this is a basic outline of what you need to know. 

As promised, here is the Luminar questions and answers video that I talked about last week. I tried to answer as any of the questions that I’ve received regarding the upcoming release of Luminar 2018 as possible in this video, although I may have missed a few (and I didn’t want to make it too long)

There’s been a pretty big response to the coverage of the pre-release of Luminar 2018 from everyone, and I know people may still have questions about it. With that in mind, I’m going to do a Q&A video later this week, where I’ll answer as many questions as I can regarding the upcoming version, and if possible I’ll demonstrate the answers.

In my first look review of Luminar 2018 I mentioned that you could possibly use LUTs for matching Fuji Film simulation modes in Luminar 2018. I dd some research and found some free LUTs online, and having tried them out, it certainly seems like this will work.